Speakup and ViaVoice.

[Kirk Reiser]

Hi Folks:  I think this is a very interresting topic so I figured I
should write in with my views and philosophies about the way speakup
is and will go for the foreseeable future.

First of all Via Voice.  It is currently not my intent to pay any
attemtion to it as a speakup synthesizer.  Maybe sometime off in the
distant future but not now.  If I am going to work towards a software
synth and I have been all along, it will be tuxTalk, was rsynth.  It
is not that I have any particular problem with a commercial product
but that with out source it is almost impossible to retro fit them.  I
have looked closely at festival and mbrolla as well but memory whise
they are pigs.  Once again sometime in the distant future I may take
another look at them to see if either festival can be trimmed down or
Mbrolla might have gone public.  For now though, it is TuxTalk and
that's it.

I am working toward making speakup work with synth drivers as modules.
It is not close yet mostly to do with the amount of bug fixes and
other features people want.  Speakup will always be able to have the
particular synth driver built-in so that people will not lose access
to the boot messages if they have a synth such as an internal or
external synth.  The point isn't whether you listen to the boot
messages or not, most of us hit the keypad enter to shut off the boot
speech.  The point is that you can, and if something goes wrong during
the boot process you have the ability to review back through those
messages to see what went wrong, instead of depending on some sighty to
come over sometime to give you a hand.

There are many many features which people have asked for and which I'd
like to include in speakup.  The current situation is that I am almost
the only person doing development work.  We are slowly getting a
community of other technical developers such as Jim Danley and Matt
Campbell, but they have not been involved long enough to have a
significant affect on the pile, in techie talk heap, of work which
still needs to be done.  Until we get to that point making large
changes won't happen quickly.

We have been working on a /dev/synth device which allows programs like
emacspeak to talk to the synth through speakup.  There are already a
number of people using this interface to varying degrees of success.
The interface is not complete but it is slowly coming along.

I've run out of things to say.  At least Temporarily! 'grin'  As far
as Via Voice goes, let me re-iterate, don't hold your breath it isn't
even on the list, which is long.

  Kirk

-- 

Kirk Reiser				The Computer Braille Facility
e-mail: kirk at braille.uwo.ca		University of Western Ontario
phone: (519) 661-3061